Among the various skills which children gradually learn, including grooming, dressing and feeding themselves, one which many children have trouble with is pill-swallowing, or the swallowing of a pharmaceutical oral dosage form which cannot or should not be chewed. Not surprisingly, in view of the difficulty of learning this skill, there are adults who likewise have the same difficulty with swallowing. Medical practitioners often find that some adult patients never in all their lives learned to swallow pills. In addition, adults not infrequently need to re-learn how to swallow pills, for a number of reasons including but not limited to physiologic changes, including oral mucosa or palate disorders, or even simply from the loss of the skill through lack of practice. As a result, a surprising number of individuals including both children and adults have such difficulty taking medication by swallowing a pill that they refuse--sometimes vehemently--even to try.
There is a known method of pill swallowing in which a quantity of liquid is taken into the mouth together with the pill, the head is inclined forward so that the pill floats on the surface of the liquid held in the mouth, and the pill is then swallowed. It is not known how many individuals actually practice this method of swallowing a pill. Some individuals lean their heads backwards when taking pills, while others keep their heads in an untilted orientation. The fact that particular methods for swallowing pills are known, however, does not address the ubiquitous problem that individuals often never have an opportunity to learn or to practice how to swallow a pill, regardless of the swallowing method used.
Methods and auxiliary aids for actually teaching pill swallowing, or deglutition in general, have not previously been developed. A need thus remains for a method well-suited for teaching deglutition in a simple and direct way. Development of an aid or kit for implementing such a teaching method would provide significant assistance in carrying out such a method.